State Sen. José Rodríguez on Wednesday said he would ask the Texas education commissioner to remove El Paso Independent School District trustees and order an election to replace them unless the board immediately disciplines employees who participated in a district cheating scandal.

Rodríguez, D-El Paso, said the last straw for him came this week when the school board approved a nearly $600,000 contract for a forensic investigation, which will be led by a former high-ranking official who was at the Texas Education Agency when it cleared the district of allegations that it was disappearing students to rig accountability measures.

Adam Jones, the former deputy commissioner at the education agency who now works at the public accounting firm Weaver, will oversee the district investigation, which the state ordered as part of several sanctions it imposed in August. Jones said he had nothing to do with audits conducted by the agency and insisted he had no conflict of interest in heading the investigation.

But Rodríguez said Jones' participation gives the appearance of a conflict of interest and leaves questions with the community.

"While he may not have worked in the same department that conducted those investigations that cleared the school district, he worked in the upper levels of the department," Rodríguez said. "The board should have known better, in my view. It seems to me as if they're helpless to manage events."

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Trustees did not return phone calls seeking comment on Wednesday.

In an emailed statement, board President Isela Castañon-Williams said, "I understand the concerns shared by Senator Rodríguez and many others in the community, and I respect his decision to convey those concerns directly to the TEA Commissioner.

"I recognize the public is very upset with many decisions, both that have and haven't been made, but our District is in a very difficult and delicate situation. Our failure to meet TEA's mandates could result in more serious sanctions that could put our District in an even worse position to recover from this tragedy."

After former Superintendent Lorenzo García in June pleaded guilty to gaming federal and state accountability measures, a barrage of elected officials and community members chided school board members for their failure to mitigate the district's problems and called for their resignations.

People criticized the board's failure to internally investigate the cheating and oversee the internal auditor, who in 2011 found evidence that some Bowie High School students were put in the wrong grade.

Rodríguez at the time, however, was hesitant to criticize the school board.

On June 25, Rodríguez said, "I must stop short of demanding their resignation in lieu of the recourse provided by law. We are first and foremost a nation of laws, and the law says that in the absence of a finding of malfeasance, in a democratic society, voters must make the decision regarding who stays and who goes."

Rodríguez on Wednesday said that he didn't rush to judgment and wanted to give trustees time to fix the district's crisis, but that they have not made good decisions.

The lawmaker also thinks the district has not done enough to help students who were pushed out of school and never graduated because of the scheme.

"After Dr. García pled and it was discussed there were six unindicted co-conspirators, I told several members of the board they needed to take immediate action under existing law to discipline those involved," Rodríguez said. "The people that were involved in this scandal are still there at the district."

City Rep. Susie Byrd, who has called for the board to resign, said she was glad "the senator has added his voice to the thousands who've asked for that same action for many months."

Most likely, there were more than six co-conspirators who engaged in cheating, Byrd said.

"What we needed months ago from the board was bold and decisive action, and they failed to do that and they had multiple excuses for why they didn't act," Byrd said. "I'm hoping the board members are beginning to hear this is everybody saying that they have failed our community and that we really need better leadership."

Because of the cheating and lack of school board response, increased state sanctions could be imminent.

State Rep. Dee Margo, R-El Paso, during a rally outside EPISD headquarters on Tuesday, said staffers of Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams told him a decision on further action against the district would probably come in the next couple of weeks.

"This weekend when I talked to his staff, they gave me the inference that he would make his decisions on what needed to be done somewhere around Election Day," Margo said.

An official with the state agency could not be reached to confirm this.

Williams earlier this month said he had given the district a deadline, which was not publicly shared, to discipline employees who participated in the cheating to avoid further state sanctions.

If the district doesn't admonish employees who cheated students of an education, Williams said, options for further sanctions include assigning a conservator who could dictate changes at the district; appointing a board of managers, who would have more power than a conservator; or installing a new board of trustees.

The agency has already assigned a monitor to the district who reports findings to the state and put the district's accreditation on probation.

The agency also required the district to hire companies that would oversee test monitoring and security for this school year, provide training to the board and staff and perform a forensic investigation to determine how the cheating went unchecked.

State Rep. Marisa Marquez, D-El Paso, said the El Paso school district's crisis warrants the removal of the school board.

"There doesn't seem to be urgency on the part of the board to take action or identify those people," Marquez said. "We're asking the commissioner to step in. I do believe there needs to be some extreme action taken because these are extreme circumstances."